


The Death of Magic

by DancingInTheStorm



Category: Merlin (TV)
Genre: Gen, and things spiral out from there, in which magic and destiny are personified as Magic and Destiny
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-23
Updated: 2019-04-23
Packaged: 2020-01-24 13:03:08
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 476
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18572041
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DancingInTheStorm/pseuds/DancingInTheStorm
Summary: Magic seeped out of the land. Only the very wise thought to ask—then where is it going?





	The Death of Magic

The war, it seemed, was endless.

Magic and Destiny, in all their ancient glory, arrayed on one side. Mankind, frail and mortal and brimming with hatred, on the other.

Victory turned to stalemate turned to slow, agonizing defeat. Destiny could be denied. Magic could not falter - but magic users, caught in the trap of mortality, could. And did.

Century after century, magic ebbed from the world as destiny retreated to the shadows. Kings, laughing through bloodstained teeth, waved them merrily on their way.

(They were corrupted, all of them. Rulers meant to nurture life denying the sacred lifeblood of not only magic but their own people; magical leaders turning from the energy of life to the warpaths of death and destruction. Dead, every one, to magic in its full right, as destiny waited and plotted revenge.)

The people were terrified and cruel, their rulers petty and frail. Fools, all of them.

Magic seeped out of the land. Only the very wise thought to ask, _then where is it going?_

Destiny gently plucked the last fragment of True Magic from the flimsy pyre of Uther Pendragon's court. Magic, for the first time since the dawn of the world, once again gathered to one place.

And the war turned.

Destiny laughed, power finally complete, as it snatched the next king of man from the enemy's bloodied death grip and turned the child to its own purposes. The move tore its way through history, sending jitters of legend and prophecy back to nearly the beginning of the war, the beginning of time. The child cried out in Destiny's embrace, screamed as his life was torn away far too early and cast far, far away, into what would one day be the future.

(Destiny was many things, but it was not always _kind_. And to the mortals who dared torment its most beloved brother -)

Magic stood at Destiny's shoulder, watching solemnly as the enemy thrashed under Destiny's steady hands. "They are but a child," he murmured.

(It was a story of another age, how Destiny was _it_ while magic was _he_.)

Destiny's laugh was harsh, the sound of ravens and jagged swords on bone. The child's lineage had harmed Magic worse than a thousand thousand ages ever had managed to do - that the child was allowed any life at all was a concession to mercy.

"True," Magic said, kind in all the ways the world no longer remembered, and cracked history to its core by stepping into the spiraling chain of events. If the prophecies of the Once and Future had been a cascade, then the appearance of Emrys was the abrupt existence of an ocean.

Magic was, at the core, the existence of miracles. And what, in a war-torn, hate-scarred nation, was more miraculous than the birth of a child?

(You know the rest of the story, don't you?)


End file.
